The Sunday New York Times was chock-a-block with interesting angles on arts management issues. Two of particular connection were an article on the slow vanishing act of architect Daniel Libeskind from the World Trade Center redevelopment; and another on the phenomenon of theater workshops of new works, and their tendency to kill full productions rather than foster them.
The Libeskind story is a parable of vision meeting reality. The architect’s early recommendations for the Ground Zero redevelopment were celebrated as fresh and honorable when first announced. Now the original vision has fallen into the hands of political and economic process, to the surprise of few, but the comment of many:
To others, the dimming of Mr. Libeskind’s glow is inevitable, a function of both a culture with a short attention span and the proper progression from overall design to individual detail. If there is less excitement about the design for the World Trade Center now than there once was, said Frederic M. Bell, the executive director of the American Institute of Architects’ New York Chapter, it is ”not through any diminishment of respect” for Mr. Libeskind. ”When the actual buildings get designed, they supplant the drawings of what they might look like with what they will look like, and that’s natural.”
That same struggle between vision and reality plagues the theater workshopping piece, that explores why so many staged readings, table readings, and more intensive theater workshops are leading to so few new produced works. Says the article:
The road to Workshop Hell is, as such things are, paved with the best intentions, aimed at giving writers — particularly young writers — a chance to develop new work in a safe environment. But according to many who have been through the cycle, it often has the opposite effect, stunting the artistic process, subjecting the work to endless critiques from random observers and inspiring waves of counterproductive, even conflicting rewrites.
It all raises questions about fostering and supporting bold creative vision in the face of dire economic, political, and practical energy (this earlier Times article offers a retread of the economic issues, if you hadn’t yet heard about the ‘perfect storm’). As arts organizations become more corporate and responsible (as they believe they must to attract and retain their broad base of skittish funders), they can become creatures of compromise. But in the meanwhile, we may all be killing the thing we’re trying to preserve.
Another fabulous case-in-point about changing one’s nature to grow toward the light comes in this other Sunday Times article on ‘municipal branding’. It seems a town in Oregon has big plans to draw the tourist trade by reframing itself as the center of the frog universe:
The branding, discussed at civic meetings over the last year, envisions frog festivals, frog art, frog T-shirts and statues of frogs on skateboards at the skate park. At the bar on Main Street, cartoons of frogs sipping draft beer, and at the town chiropractor, a frog on crutches — frogs on everything, and an advertising campaign to let the world know.
It all begs the question(s): what’s the boundary between fostering something, and extinguishing its essence? Between clarifying who we are to an outside world and forgetting who we are within ourselves? Between being bold and being responsible? It’s not an easy balance, to be sure, but it’s worth bringing forward to ask.
